The Raven Boys

"Also," said Ronan, moving off toward a pair of doors at the other end of the floor, "dust."

For a moment, Ronan and Adam craned their necks, looking around the spread-out space as if they, too, were seeing it for the first time. The vast room, painted red with afternoon sun through the dozens of windowpanes, was beautiful and cluttered. It reminded Blue of the feeling she had when she had first seen Gansey’s journal.

For the first time in days, she thought about the vision of his fingers resting on her face.

Blue, kiss me.

For one half of a breath, Blue closed her eyes to reset her thoughts.

"I have to feed Chainsaw," Ronan said, a sentence that made absolutely no sense to Blue. He disappeared into the tiny office and shut the door behind himself. An inhuman squawking noise emitted from within, which Adam didn’t comment on.

"We’re not doing anything today, obviously," Adam said. "Do you want to hang out?"

Blue looked around for a couch. It would be easier to hang out with a couch. There was an unmade bed in the middle of the room, a very expensive-looking leather armchair (the sort with glossy brass bolts holding the leather in place) situated in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling windows, and a desk chair with papers scattered across it. No couch.

"Has Noah —?"

Adam shook his head.

Blue sighed. Maybe, she thought, Adam was right about Noah’s body. Maybe moving it off the ley line had stolen his energy.

"Is he here?" she asked.

"It feels like it. I don’t know."

To the empty air, she said, "You can use my energy, Noah. If that’s what you need."

Adam’s expression was enigmatic. "That’s brave of you."

She didn’t think so; if it was something that she needed to be brave about, she was certain her mother wouldn’t have her along to the church watch. "I like to be useful. So, do you live here, too?"

Adam shook his head, his eyes on the spread of Henrietta outside the windows. "Gansey would like me to. He likes all of his things in one place." His voice was a little bitter, and after a pause, he added, "I shouldn’t say things like that. He doesn’t mean it badly. And we’re — it’s just, this place is Gansey’s. Everything in it is Gansey’s. I need to be an equal, and I can’t be, living here."

"Where do you live?"

Adam’s mouth was very set. "A place made for leaving."

"That’s not really an answer."

"It’s not really a place."

"And it would be terrible to live here?" She leaned her head back to gaze at the ceiling far above. The entire place smelled dusty, but in the good, old way of a library or a museum.

"Yes," Adam replied. "When I get out on my own, it will be to someplace I made myself."

"And that’s why you go to Aglionby."

He leveled that gaze on her. "And that’s why I go to Aglionby."

"Even though you’re not rich."

He hesitated.

"Adam, I don’t care," Blue said. Parsed on the most basic level, it wasn’t really the most gutsy sentence ever said, but it felt gutsy to Blue when she said it. "I know other people do, but I don’t."

He made a little face, and then inclined his head in the slightest of nods. "Even though I’m not rich."

"True confession —" Blue said. "I’m not rich, either."

Adam laughed out loud at that, and she discovered that she was starting to really like this laugh that burst out of him and seemed to surprise him every time. She was a little scared of the knowledge that she was starting to like it.

He said, "Oh. Hey. Come over here. You’ll like this."

The floor creaking under him, he led the way past the desk to the windows on the far side. Blue felt a sense of dizzying height here; these massive old factory windows began only a few inches above the old wide floorboards, and the first floor was much taller than the first floor of her house. Crouching, Adam began pawing through a row of cardboard file boxes that were shoved against the windows.

Eventually he dragged one of the boxes a few inches from the window and gestured for Blue to sit beside him. She did. Adam readjusted his posture so that he was more settled; his knee bone pressed against Blue’s. He was not looking at her, but there was something about his posture that betrayed his awareness of her. She swallowed.

"These are things that Gansey’s found," Adam said. "Things not cool enough for museums, or things they couldn’t prove were old, or things he didn’t want to give away."

"In this box?" Blue asked.

"In all the boxes. This is the Virginia box." He tipped it enough that the contents spilled between them, along with a prodigious quantity of dirt.

"Virginia box, huh? What are the other boxes?"

There was something of a little boy in his smile. "Wales and Peru and Australia and Montana and other strange places."

Blue took a forked stick from the pile. "Is this another dowsing rod?" Though she had never used one, she knew some psychics used them as a tool to focus their intuition and to lead them in the direction of lost items, or dead bodies, or hidden bodies of water. A low-tech version of Gansey’s fancy EMF reader.

"I guess. Might just be a stick." Adam showed her an old Roman coin. She used it to scrape some ages-old dust off a tiny sculpted stone dog. The dog was missing a back leg; the jagged wound revealed stone lighter than the rest of the grubby surface.

"He looks a little hungry," Blue commented. The stylized dog sculpture reminded her of the raven carved into the side of the hill — head bent back, body elongated.

Adam picked up a stone with a hole in it and looked at her through it. The shape of it perfectly covered the last remnants of his bruise.

Blue selected a matching stone and looked at him through its matching hole. One side of his face was red with the afternoon light. "Why are these in the box?"

"Water bored these holes," Adam said. "Seawater. But he found them in the mountains. I think he said they matched some of the stones he found in the UK."

He was still looking at her through the hole, the stone making a strange eyeglass. She watched his throat move, and then, he reached out and touched her face.

"You sure are pretty," he said.

"It’s the stone," she replied immediately. Her skin felt warm; his fingertip touched just the very edge of her mouth. "It’s very flattering."